Two Generation Approaches to Supporting Early Childhood Development

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The lives of children and their caregivers are intimately linked, but research and intervention often address the needs of each separately. This disconnect might be a key limitation of existing efforts to improve the lives of children and to disrupt the intergenerational transmission of poverty.
In the United States, “two generation approaches” - efforts to improve outcomes for children and the adults in their lives simultaneously - have gained some traction, building an expanding field of practice over several decades, but this strategy has not yet been applied to many global settings. Across international contexts, a different landscape of actors, interventions, challenges, and dynamics might necessitate new and different approaches to two generation policy, programming, and research.
One key principle of two generation approaches is that they might be most appropriate for children and families facing severe adversity; they represent a strategy for addressing the multiple intersecting vulnerabilities affecting these populations. Two generation approaches might accordingly be particularly useful in humanitarian contexts. At an estimated 120 million, the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide is at an all-time high, representing 12 years of consecutive annual increases and nearly double the population of forcibly displaced from 2014 (UNHRC, 2024). Children are overrepresented in populations of forcibly displaced: they make up a third of the world’s population but represent 50 percent of the world’s refugees (UNICEF, 2020). In 2019, more than 71 million children under the age of 5 had spent their entire lives in conflict-affected settings.
ECD intervention and research in humanitarian contexts is limited. In terms of funding, only two percent of humanitarian aid is targeted for ECD (Moving Minds Alliance, 2020). More broadly, access to high quality early childhood programming is inadequate and inequitable across many global contexts, not just those defined by emergency. It is estimated that 43 percent of children under the age of 5 in LMICs are at risk for not meeting their developmental potential (Black et al., 2017). These challenges are particularly acute for children under the age of three (Black et al., 2017).
Parents and other caregivers are critically important for children’s development in any context but can play an especially important role in settings defined by severe adversity. Frequent and prolonged experiences of severe adversity can result in a toxic stress response in children, disrupting the development of their brains and other organ systems and leading to long term negative consequences for children’s learning, behavior, and health (Center on the Developing Child, 2007; Garner et al., 2012). The most important protective factor to mitigate the effects of toxic stress is a positive, responsive relationship with an adult caregiver, typically a parent (Britto et al., 2017; Garner & Yogman, 2021).
In contexts of severe adversity, though, parents and other caregivers are also affected by the challenges and stressors of the setting, potentially limiting their ability to provide responsive care (Halevi et al., 2016). Finding ways to support parents and other caregivers, in addition to direct intervention with children could improve outcomes for children in a range of direct and indirect pathways, from better nutrition and care and reduced stress in the household to enabling early education programs to become more effective.
Organizations such as IPA, BRAC, and the IRC have been exploring different programming, policy approaches, and research to better understand the interaction and connections between children and their caregivers, how household poverty and other factors influence child development and constrain the effectiveness of existing intervention, and how child-facing and adult-facing interventions could be combined, aligned and/or sequenced. Ultimately the goal is to advance our understanding of how to most meaningfully improve outcomes for young children and their families and assess if these approaches have the potential to generate breakthrough outcomes for the most vulnerable.
In this panel we share some of the progress of these initiatives, reflections on lessons learned, and ideas for future work and new directions.

Sub Unit

• Early Childhood Development SIG

Chairs

• Sarah Kabay, Innovations For Poverty Action

• Rafiath Rashid, BRAC International

Individual Presentations

• Kulea Watoto: Two-Generation ECD and Economic Recovery Programming for Refugee Families in Uganda - Godfrey Mwesigye, International Rescue Committee (IRC)

• Exploring caregiver and child time use and the influence of livelihoods and childcare services - Vianney Mbonigaba, Innovations for Poverty Action; Sarah Kabay, Innovations For Poverty Action